Naming is Not Knowing: Why Cognitive Warfare Studies Need a Methodological Reset

The study of cognitive warfare has entered a period of remarkable conceptual productivity. New frameworks, new taxonomies, and new categories continue to emerge, each seeking to capture a previously overlooked dimension of conflict.

Increasingly, however, the field also appears willing to entertain concepts that are highly speculative, only loosely connected to observable mechanisms, and whose explanatory necessity remains uncertain. The recent appearance of alchemic warfare in a this journal is therefore less interesting in itself than what it reveals about the intellectual trajectory of the field.

Every mature discipline develops new terminology. New technologies and new forms of conflict require new analytical tools, and without conceptual innovation, strategic thought would stagnate. The difficulty begins only when the production of concepts starts to outpace the production of understanding.

Over the past decade the literature around cognitive warfare has undergone an extraordinary expansion of vocabulary: cognitive warfare, narrative warfare, epistemic warfare, cognitive maneuver, cognitive security, reflexive control, information confrontation, sense-making, meaning-making, memetic warfare and numerous other conceptual refinements.

Each promises to reveal a previously overlooked dimension of conflict. Each proposes a new framework, a new taxonomy, a new lens. Yet it is far from obvious that the field understands its object any better than it did five years ago.

That paradox is the subject of this essay.

A discipline should be measured not by the number of concepts it produces but by the explanatory power of the concepts it retains. New terminology earns its place only if it lets reality be observed more accurately, predictions become more reliable, or decisions improve under uncertainty. Absent that test, conceptual innovation becomes an end in itself. Understanding is replaced by classification, and the field increasingly mistakes conceptual production for intellectual progress.

None of this diminishes the contribution made by many researchers over the past decade. The institutionalization of cognitive warfare has brought together previously disconnected disciplines and significantly expanded strategic attention to influence, perception and decision-making. The concern raised here is different. It is that the field’s conceptual productivity exceeds its methodological discipline.

This essay traces how a field arrives there, why the people best placed to correct it are rarely the ones writing, and what a corrective method would require.

How a Discipline Loses Contact with Reality

None of the underlying practices are new.

Twenty-five centuries ago, Sun Tzu ranked subduing an enemy without fighting above any victory in battle. Kautilya catalogued disinformation and agents of influence as ordinary statecraft. Shaping perception, corroding morale, manufacturing uncertainty—all ancient.

What is recent is the language, and the language did not converge. It accreted.

The Soviets formalized the problem in the 1960s as reflexive control: feeding an adversary prepared information so that he freely chooses the decision selected for him.

France published La guerre cognitive (cognitive warfare) in 2002, eighteen years before NATO institutionalized the term.

Chinese doctrine incorporated the “three warfares” in 2003. The United States moved through perception management, command-and-control warfare, and information operations; the first explicit use of “cognitive warfare” is usually traced to a 1996 U.S. Air University thesis on command dysfunction and the limits of rational decision-making.

Each power theorized its own reflection in another’s mirror. Nobody is the origin.

In other words, unlike kinetic warfare, the concept has no native boundaries: it was never invented so much as assembled from psychology, intelligence, political communication, cyber operations, marketing, behavioral economics, and neuroscience. Each contributing field solved a different problem and left behind a different piece of vocabulary.

That is why the definitions of cognitive warfare never agree: distinct phenomena travel under one word.

The result is a porous field in which mechanisms already well understood elsewhere reappear under new names, and the impression of sophistication grows with every added label whether or not understanding grows with it.

The terrain compounds the problem. The environment in which these operations actually run—the gray zone—is poorly understood, and it yields its structure mainly to those who have operated inside it, not to those who have only read about it. Some terrains are legible only from within; a literature written entirely from the outside will keep mistaking the map for the ground.

A Field in That Condition Loses Contact with Reality at a Specific Moment

Academic knowledge is validated by adoption—by whether peers take up the term. Operational knowledge is different by nature: it is validated by effect, by whether the intervention in the real-world worked.

The surrounding economy rewards precisely that. Novelty is more publishable than refinement; a coinage travels further than a correction; platforms reward volume, metrics reward circulation, and none of them reward retraction.

Under those incentives the rational career move is to name something new, not to verify or discard something old. The institutional trigger of 2020, when a NATO-sponsored study gave the phrase an official stamp, only accelerated this.

Bureaucracies replicate what NATO stamps, and the vocabulary spread faster than anyone’s grasp of what it named.

The youth of a discipline, however, is not sufficient to explain this dynamic. Nuclear strategy emerged almost overnight after 1945 to confront an entirely unprecedented strategic reality. Yet despite the novelty of the problem, its conceptual vocabulary remained remarkably parsimonious. Concepts such as deterrence, second-strike capability, mutually assured destruction, and escalation dominance endured because they repeatedly demonstrated explanatory and predictive value. The field matured by allowing a relatively small number of concepts to survive sustained confrontation with reality.

The trouble with cognitive warfare starts when concepts cease to emerge from observation and begin emerging from other concepts. The distinction between narrative warfare, epistemic warfare, memetic warfare, semantic warfare, and other increasingly specialized labels illustrates the problem. While each emphasizes a slightly different aspect of influence, it is not always clear whether they describe distinct causal mechanisms or simply different analytical perspectives on substantially similar processes.

Researchers begin by asking which framework best accommodates what they have already decided exists. That is the main problem. The object of study slowly becomes the literature rather than the world.

This is not peculiar to cognitive warfare.

Thomas Kuhn observed that scientific communities develop paradigms that govern not only how questions are answered but which questions count as legitimate.

Pierre Bourdieu described intellectual fields as arenas governed by their own internal incentives and forms of symbolic capital.

Strategic studies are not exempt. Scholars compete for originality, citations and distinction, and under those conditions novelty acquires value independently of whether it explains anything.

The safeguards that should catch this are among the first to be captured by it.

Peer review, journals, and institutes exist precisely to test claims and retire the ones that fail. But they operate inside the same attention economy, and an outlet rewarded for circulation has little reason to perform the unglamorous work of elimination. When the filter runs on the same incentive as the flood, it stops filtering and the field is left with almost no mechanism for putting things back in their place.

Practitioners and Theorists Produce Different Knowledge

The luxury of theory is to name things. Its natural product is classification: orderly, legible, publishable, and rewarded in proportion to novelty.

The constraint of operations is to act before anything is named. Its product is tacit and procedural: a feel for what will move a decision, tested immediately against whether the decision moved.

Operators rarely name what they do while doing it, which is why, by the time the literature debates a definition, the mechanism has been in use for years.

These epistemologies optimize for different things.

The theorist is rewarded for a distinction that reads well; the practitioner is punished for one that does not survive contact with reality. A theorist can build an entire architecture on a category that has never once been operationalized and lose nothing. A practitioner who mistakes a label for a lever loses the operation.

This also explains why the field’s most elaborate taxonomies are often produced by those observing operations rather than conducting them. For the observer, classification appears to be the work because it is the most visible part of the work. For the practitioner, however, classification is only a means to an end. What ultimately matters is not whether a mechanism has been named, but whether it can be anticipated, shaped, or exploited. What the interior teaches is narrower and harder. The practitioner knows that a decision is changed by engineering the environment around the person or the group until a conclusion appears self-evident (the adviser who raises the concern independently, the second signal that confirms the first, the coincidence that is not one). No single move decides anything; convergence does.

Generalize that, and a conclusion follows that most of the literature resists: if changing a decision means changing the environment in which it forms, the decision was never forming solely inside the skull.

The Four Pathologies of the Current Literature

Conceptual inflation is the compound effect of four reinforcing tendencies, each benign in isolation.

First: Conceptual Inflation

New terms arrive faster than new understanding, and each is defended by the weight of its citations rather than its yield. A useful test exposes the pattern: does a proposed category let anyone predict something, intervene in something, or see something previously invisible? If not, the taxonomy has grown while the capability has not.

Second: The Misplaced Battlefield

The founding NATO-sponsored study declared the brain the battlefield of the century and the human the contested domain; author after author then locates the fight in perception, belief, attention, or neural tissue. Yet no head of state reads the world directly and no commander observes a theater directly. Reality reaches every decision-maker through filters (analysts, reports, dashboards, algorithms, feeds) layers of interpretation that arrive before conscious thought. Cognition is distributed across those layers, a claim cognitive science has made for three decades under names like distributed cognition and the extended mind. A discipline named after cognition has contrived not to notice, and so it aims inward, at the head, when the picture of the world is built outside it.

Third: The Umbrella

“Cognitive warfare” is a label under which distinct mechanisms (psychological, informational, technical, behavioral) are gathered and then argued over as though they formed a single object. Words organize attention: they tell a field what to observe, measure, fund, and ignore. “Information warfare” points at information, “psychological warfare” at emotion, “cyber warfare” at infrastructure. “Cognitive warfare” points at something more abstract, then borrows “cognition” from science while proceeding as if the word required no explanation. “Cognition” sounds scientific where “propaganda” sounds ideological, and descriptive where “manipulation” sounds moral. The label depoliticizes a political problem without changing it, and files it, reassuringly, under science.

Fourth: the Arbiter Smuggled in As a Remedy

Confronted with hostile influence, one strand of the literature proposes to restore the citizen’s rational autonomy. Unmediated, autonomous perception is a fantasy; no analyst and no agency verifies everything, because no one can, and the construction of reality is delegated out of necessity. A doctrine that promises to abolish that delegation must then appoint someone to certify which perceptions are sound. It does not remove the arbiter of reality; it installs one, moving the throne from the individual mind to the institution. A program that defends the public from managed reality by managing the public’s reality has already lost the argument it set out to win.

What an Operational Methodology Should Look Like

The correction is a method, and its first rule is parsimony under an operational test: a concept earns its place only if removing it costs sight or leverage.

If a term can be deleted and nothing a practitioner can do is lost, the term was an ornament to start with.

The method begins from observation rather than the library.

It asks where a phenomenon actually happens before deciding what to call it and in this case the answer relocates the target.

If the picture of reality is assembled outside the head, the primary battlefield is not the head; it is the ecology that produces the picture. Confusing the two is like confusing naval warfare with the ocean. Analysis should therefore map circulation and environment (the defaults, channels, and intermediaries through which perception is constructed) rather than fixate on visible actors and their stated narratives.

A Concept Must Be Able to Fail

A framework that no conceivable observation could contradict is descriptive, not explanatory, and immune to correction. If nothing could count as evidence against it, it cannot be tested, and an untestable concept is exactly the kind the field should stop rewarding.

Method Selects, Rather Than Only Adds

Academic production is additive by default: concepts are layered and the field grows crowded without growing clearer. A healthier discipline forces frameworks to compete on explanatory performance and lets the losers disappear. That requires someone willing to do the pruning: journals and institutes performing an intellectual selection function rather than a distribution one. Because the prevailing incentives push the other way, the work of subtraction cannot be left to institutions alone. This standard applies to every framework, including terrain-first models advanced here or elsewhere.

A mature discipline is defined as much by the concepts it abandons as by the concepts it invents. Curiously, cognitive warfare studies possess elaborate mechanisms for introducing new concepts but remarkably few for eliminating unsuccessful ones.

Conclusion: Fewer Concepts, More Explanatory Power

Cognitive warfare is best read not as the thing to be explained but as a symptom. One visible expression of how power operates in saturated, fragmented, interconnected systems.

There is a difference between naming a class of actions and mapping the terrain that makes those actions cheap and effective, and the literature has spent 6 years elaborating the first while neglecting the second. It has built a rich vocabulary with a very poor map of the ground.

Every new concept increases not only the vocabulary of the field but also… its cognitive load. That is the great irony cognitive warfare studies is facing. Unless it delivers proportionally greater explanatory power, it leaves practitioners with a poorer analytical instrument than before.

Progress will come from subtraction: fewer concepts, each earning its place, measured by explanatory and operational yield rather than by adoption. The test of an idea in war is not how much it can classify on paper but how much it lets a practitioner anticipate, intervene, or see.

By that measure, most of the field’s recent additions are subtractions waiting to happen.

Every mature discipline is remembered less for the concepts it invented than for the concepts it had the discipline to abandon.